Curriculum as settlement: re-functioning HPE purposes across New Zealand’s 1999/2007 and 2025 curriculum moments

This paper analyses the proposed re-settlement of Health and Physical Education (HPE) for Years 0–10 in Aotearoa New Zealand through the 2025 draft curriculum and surrounding policy debate. Re-settlement denotes the reworking of a temporarily stabilised yet contestable configuration of HPE purposes, legitimate knowledge, imagined learners, and relations of authority. Drawing on policy sociology and Critical Discourse Analysis, we compare the 1999/2007 curriculum settlement with the 2025 draft and examine how curriculum reform defines HPE, constructs preferred learners, citizens, bodies, and redistributes authority among the state, schools, and the profession. The analysis identifies a shift from conceptual coherence and professional flexibility towards a year-by-year teaching sequence organised through specified knowledge, practices, and progression. This architecture also reconfigures the relationship between Health Education and Physical Education. Although the draft retains elements of criticality, sector responses contest its epistemic and cultural direction, arguing that it weakens conceptual integration and risks narrowing Physical Education towards performative, measurable outcomes. We interpret these changes as a re-functioning of HPE’s public purposes: what the subject is for, whose knowledge counts, and which forms of inclusion are structurally supported. Implications are identified for curriculum enactment, professional learning, policy advocacy, and Health and Physical Education Teacher Education.